Eek, no! The DT stuff needs to keep up with leap second and time zone change announcements, so it needs its own release schedule. We'd have to figure out a way to release data packages separately from what's in the core.

Of course, in theory, I can see why this should be in the core, just because it's the kind of low-level data type that you want for programming.

But given how easy CPAN is to use, is it really a big barrier? I think the big problem, as usual, is that there's lots of similar stuff to wade through. Fortunately, DateTime seems to have enough of a following these days that every time there's a datetime programming question, at least one respondent says "use DateTime", so the word is out.